Hello everyone
rightly iNaturalist is fundamentally about sharing and collaboration, as I read here https://help.inaturalist.org/en/support/solutions/articles/151000171273-can-i-make-private-observations-that-aren-t-shared-publicly-
Now I am looking for a tool on which to build a platform for some entomological surveys for agriculture, commissioned by a company that has forbidden me to publish the collected data (not even the hidden coordinates).
I was thinking of installing an instance of INaturalist and modifying it for my purpose. Or I ask if you have any suggestions for tools that manage geotags, annotations, links between observations and the possibility of connecting with API (some important observations to share can be exported to INaturalist for example).
I’m not a professional computer scientist, but I like to explore, and try, and possibly assign the task to a professional computer scientist for the major work.
ESRI fieldmaps is often used for this purpose but a license is somewhat pricy at $700 a year I think.
There are numerous open source GIS programs and apps available too, but will probably have a higher learning curve.
Do you need just a solution to store/manage data, or do you also need computer vision (AI identification) and input from the community for identification?
You can put your data into a spreadsheet (.csv), and if it includes coordinates you can open it in for example QGis if you want to explore your data on a map. It will also allow you to create maps which you can put in your report. However it requires some training, but its not overly complicated and there are loads of videos and tutorials online.
thanks for the answer speed!
I don’t need AI computer vision identification.
The thing i need most is a platform for viewing and editing information for each observation, which includes one or more photos, also taken over time, with a dashboard. Maybe a CMS module that manages photos could be enough, but that is elastic to be able to adjust it to my needs and the relationships between photos and observations. But for now i haven’t found something like that.
in the past i used odk to take data in the field, now in the field instead i go much faster with paper and pencil and a good camera, since it is not a citizen science project.
Every suggestion is really very welcome!
are you trying to use a system because you need multiple people to gather data in a standard format? if you’re the only one collecting data, or if you can ask people to follow a set of desk procedures, i would just add all the necessary data as metadata tags on the image files themselves and then store your files in a safe place. there should be plenty of ways to export or import the information from such a collection of tagged files for analysis.
Hi Pisum
I need to set up a system because other people need to be able to see the photos and locations and intervene in the interpretation. It would also be ideal if the system could generate statistics to display.
if you’re on the same network, you could all just load to the same network share. or if you’re not on the same network, you could just load to a cloud share that you all have access to.
i’m not sure what this means.
there are many ways to do this. i don’t think any of what you’re describing here is necessarily something that requires a system.
in my mind, the only reason for building a system would be to make loading or access to the data a little more customized for a particular workflow.
as i noted, there are already many ways existing ways to extract the metadata from a set of image files. from there, you can generate whatever statistics you want from that data.
Hi Pisum
thanks.
let me explain better: the work is to collect stink bug eggs, and their parasitoids. The egg masses must be interpreted based on the type of release, and the parasitoids are identified.
In practice each egg mass has a code, an interpretation (stink bug identification, how many eggs, how many stink bugs born, how many preyed on, how many parasitized) and several photos, taken at different times, some of parasitoids that will be identified.
For now I use an online spreadsheet with several worksheets with the egg masses and the related photos.
It is a large amount of photos.
That’s why I got the idea that a database was necessary.
are you saying that you keep the photos inside the spreadsheet itself? or are you just making references to the photos in the spreadsheet?
if it’s the latter, that would imply that you already have photos stored in their own shared location. given that kind of existing setup, i don’t see how moving the data to a true database necessarily improves upon a spreadsheet here. (what is the specific problem that the database would solve here?)
you could move all that data to a true database, of course, but then you have to have a user interface for it. that’s a lot of work for what seems to me like very little gain.
but maybe if you created a very simple SQLite or other similarly simple database, then maybe you could just use an application like QGIS to provide the interface to input data, query dtata, map data, export data, etc… depending on how your spreadsheet is set up, that conversion to a simple database like this might be something that could be done in an afternoon.
Have you considered Survey123 with ArcGIS Online? If you share a survey so that people with the url can submit responses (share publicly), you can configure the survey to include places for the users to submit photos and other information. The Creator level license of ~$700 is only required for the person who made the survey and dashboard in the first place. One of the nice things about Survey123 is that you can then configure webhooks pretty easily with PowerAutomate or another comparable product so you receive an email every time a survey is submitted, that sort of thing.
ArcGIS Online has a very low barrier to entry. If that solution seems like it would work for you, you likely would not need to contract a computer scientist. I work with Relational Database Management Systems and do not see how a more complex solution like that would serve your needs, although I could be missing something.
Hi @pisum
Here is a simple example for one farm only, not secret!
https://rpubs.com/bonushenricus/cimice_lombardi_24
(the other work, “secret” is for 20 sites!)
The problem is only the fact that with R I’m not able to edit the data in a specific window for every observations. Yes I know, it could be possible maybe with shiny, but since it seems complicated (to me), maybe it was worth trying to develop a platform with a database!
So I though about INaturalist alternatives (but “secret”) …
Thank you
it seems like you really want to set up a system, and i guess if you have the resources to set one up and maintain it, then i guess there’s nothing wrong with that. there must be tons of different existing software applications, systems, and systems as a service that all the different museums, universities, collections, herbaria, etc. out there use to track their stuff. so unless you want to reinvent the wheel for some reason – since cost and simplicity doesn’t seem to concern you – then i would start my search with those kinds of solutions.
If you / the organization uses wordpress, you might want to check out Tainacan: https://tainacan.org/en/
It’s an open-source add-on for creating repositories which can include photos, attachments, and custom metadata & taxonomies. I believe it also supports log-in for users with different permissions, but I haven’t used those features myself.
Outside of practical GIS applications, I don’t know much about database management but does this possibly do anything for you? Its a collections database software that museums use. https://www.specifysoftware.org/
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